Hi all, I'm a newbie to digital imaging and regular ("film") photography. My father has had a hobby in photography since probably before I was born but has very little computer knowledge. Ok enough with the life story. The point is that he has lots of slides he has taken over the years and I thought a good gift for him would be a film scanner. I've been looking in the $500-$600 dollar range but I'm willing to spend as much as $700. Looking over reviews and product specs instead of being pointed in some direction I just get more and more confused. The other factors involved are my parents' machine is Pentium w/ Win95 (I'm not sure if its a PII or not). It does have USB ports (but then I would have to upgrade their machine to Win98, so it would have to worth the effort). They do not have SCSI but again I could always install it for them. The other confusion I have is that the impression I get is that unlike other computer peripherals where cheaper means less features, with film scanners I get the impression it means older (which to some extent equates to features but not exactly).

The question which is probably obvious is what to get them? Even a short list of good scanners in that price range would be useful.

thanks in advance -Jason

-- Jason Koppel (jkoppel@ibes.com), January 10, 2000

Answers

Depending on the quality, ed hamrick, suggests the minolta scan dual as an entry level scanner. A step up may be the canoscan 2710. These may be worth a try. Something with 12 bit scan depth would be an asset to get as much detail in the shadows as possible. The other item to look at if you're father was to do a lot of scanning is a CD writer to store the scanned images. It doesn't take a lot of images to start to fill a hard drive.

-- Jonathan Ratzlaff (jonathanr@clrtech.bc.ca), January 12, 2000.

I had an in-store demo of the Minolta scan-dual, and was not impressed.

The HP 20s gets good reviews, and seems much better value. USB only though :(

But check out ACERs ScanWit 2720s film scanner. The specification beats the Minolta hands down, and it comes complete with a PCI bus SCSI card. All for around US$500. I bought one several weeks ago, and certainly don't regret it. The drawback seems to be that not many dealers have it on the shelves, or have even heard of it!

There is a picture of it and list of specs at:

http://www.acerperipherals.com/imaging/scanwit.html

and a list of potential stockists at:

http://www.aceralliance.com

I have no connection with ACER, I just think that this product deserves to be better known. Besides, Canon, Minolta and Nikon could do with a little healthy competition, it might bring their inflated prices down.

Regards,

-- Pete Andrews (p.l.andrews@bham.ac.uk), January 14, 2000.